ONE DEAD, NINE INJURED DURING PROTESTS IN LICE

TURKEY – One person was killed on Friday in south-east Turkey as paramilitary forces fired shots to disperse hundreds of people protesting against the expansion of a police station, according to local officials. The victim was identified as 18-year-old Medeni Yıldırım. Nine people were also wounded, two of them seriously, according to a statement from the governor’s office in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir.

“One person is dead and nine others have been injured. The injured people are being treated in several hospitals. Two of them are in critical condition,” said Diyarbakir governor Mustafa Cahit Kiraç.

As the group held a demonstration to halt the construction of an additional building for the patrol in the village of Kayacık, it reportedly set some tents on fire there.

The gendarme used tear gas against the protesters, who wanted to break into the construction site. Ambulances were directed to the site to assist the injured. Protesters threw stones at workers and also used Molotov cocktails, as the gendarme fired warning shots, media reports said.

The gendermerie opened fire after the crowd of around 300 torched construction tents and marched on the construction site, hurling stones and molotov cocktails at security forces, Kıraç told.

However, after a firsthand experience of so many false statements by government officials and manipulated news in the media during “Gezi Park Protests,” the public is skeptical of the information that is served to them.

Kıraç said some groups that wanted to prevent the ongoing process to find a solution to the Kurdish issue might emerge as the instigators.

“Whoever is preventing this process with whatever motivation will be revealed at the end of the legal investigation,” he said, calling citizens to maintain peace in the region.

Blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and much of the West, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) reached a ceasefire agreement with Ankara in March. Its fighters are still withdrawing into northern Iraq in line with that deal.

Since the outlawed PKK has waged a bloody campaign for nearly three decades, leaving 45,000 people dead.

The clash came as Ankara bids to contain unrelated anti-government protests that began on May 31 in Istanbul but quickly spread across the country after a heavy-handed police crackdown against the mostly peaceful demonstrators.

The series of demonstrations have so far left four people dead and nearly 8,000 injured, posing one of the biggest challenges to the decade-old government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The incidents in Lice were marked at the forums in Istanbul parks, which emerged in the aftermath the Gezi Park protests that shook the city for more than three weeks.

Participants in the forums at city parks both on the Asian and European sides of Istanbul chanted slogans in support of the people in Lice and condemning the violence there.